Wednesday, 24 May 2000

I had a lot of fun in 2014 watching each of the 36 films that Charlie Chaplin made in 1914 (well, the 35 that still exist, at least). What made it most fun was watching them a hundred years to the day from their original release, so seeing them at the rate that the audiences of the time did.

A neat side effect was that I kept on task and so inherently had a book ready to proof and edit by the end of the year, so I conjured up a similar project. This one wouldn't involve the centennials of films but of people, working to the same sort of structure.

So, here's 2016 Centennials.

Each review here was posted on what would have been (or in some instances actually was) the one hundredth birthday of someone important to the film industry. The aim was to remember them with an interesting film from their career that, in the process, allows me to explore another aspect of history, whether to cinema, something wider or both.

Some of these people are famous, household names that we grew up watching. Some aren't. And some used to be, but a hundred years is a long time and things change. All, however, are important.

These carefully curated films vary by era, genre and nationality and, together, help to enrich my knowledge and maybe yours too. I collated these reviews into a book, A Hundred in 2016, which won the Alan Black Cirque du Livre Book of the Festival in 2017.

I had so much fun last year celebrating the centennials of important people to film, a project that led to my award-winning fifth book, A Hundred in 2016, that I knew I had to continue in 2017.

So, here's my Centennials 2017 project.

Each review here was posted on what would have been (or in some instances actually was) the one hundredth birthday of someone important to the film industry. The aim is to remember them with an interesting film from their career that, in the process, allows me to explore another aspect of history, whether to cinema, something wider or both.

Some of these people are famous, household names that we grew up watching. Some aren't. And some used to be, but a hundred years is a long time and things change. All, however, are important.

These carefully curated films vary by era, genre and nationality and, together, help to enrich my knowledge and maybe yours too. I'll collate these reviews into a new book, A Hundred in 2017, to be released at the beginning of 2018.

I enjoyed celebrating the centennials of important people to film, a project that led to my award-winning fifth book, A Hundred in 2016, so much that I knew I had to continue in 2017. Here I am for the 2018 edition, year three for me on this project.

So, here's 2018 Centennials.

Each review here was posted on what would have been (or in some instances actually was) the one hundredth birthday of someone important to the film industry. The aim is to remember them with an interesting film from their career that, in the process, allows me to explore another aspect of history, whether to cinema, something wider or both.

Some of these people are famous, household names that we grew up watching. Some aren't. And some used to be, but a hundred years is a long time and things change. All, however, are important.

These carefully curated films vary by era, genre and nationality and, together, help to enrich my knowledge and maybe yours too. I'll collate these reviews into a new book, A Hundred in 2018, to be released at the beginning of 2019.

I enjoyed celebrating the centennials of important people to film, a project that led to my award-winning fifth book, A Hundred in 2016, so much that I knew I had to continue in 2017. I'm enjoying this series, so I'm back for the 2019 edition, year four for me.

So, here's 2019 Centennials.

Each review here was posted on what would have been (or in some instances actually was) the one hundredth birthday of someone important to the film industry. The aim is to remember them with an interesting film from their career that, in the process, allows me to explore another aspect of history, whether to cinema, something wider or both.

Some of these people are famous, household names that we grew up watching. Some aren't. And some used to be, but a hundred years is a long time and things change. All, however, are important.

These carefully curated films vary by era, genre and nationality and, together, help to enrich my knowledge and maybe yours too. I'll collate these reviews into a new book, A Hundred in 2019, to be released at the beginning of 2020.

During 2010 I'm working through the greatest movies of all time, two hundred and fifty of them. Each week of the year I'll be posting reviews of five movies from the IMDb Top 250 List, but that creates something of an imbalance on a blog where I review the good, the bad and the ugly.

If the IMDb Top 250 movies are the good and there's plenty on here already to count as the bad, that leaves the ugly. That's what this page is for.

Each week I'll also be writing a review of one of the worst movies of all time for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese and then indexing them here too as premiere examples of Cinematic Hell. I'm grateful to Kevin, Jeff and David for the privilege. Please check out their site and the many, many other wonderful things they do. Go buy a copy of Blown for starters.

Here are my reviews, along with ratings from my wife and I and links to each film's page at IMDb. Read these reviews at your peril! You have been warned!

Tuesday, 23 May 2000

Everyone knows that they've been making westerns in Arizona since time began, but we've been shooting other genre flicks here for a long time too and many of those seem to have been unjustly forgotten.

So here's my Dry Heat Obscurities project, in which I take a look back at genre features which were shot entirely or, at least, predominantly in Arizona.

I'm covering the films themselves, of course, and the people who made them (who are surprisingly often people that you've heard of), but I'm also taking a good look at the locations they used. Hopefully, when I hit a particular point in the project, I'll be able to travel around the state to get some photos of what they look like today, decades on.

I'm going to review a new dry heat obscurity every other week, starting in 2017, to alternate with my Weird Wednesdays project.

Note: my reviews of Violent Saturday and Kingdom of the Spiders predate this project, so I'll revisit them at some point.

Friday, 19 May 2000

I'm a genre fan at heart and the core of that heart is the horror genre, so I've wanted to do a year long horror project for a while.

What I came up with was the Horror Movie Calendar. So many horror movies are set on holidays (Halloween is merely the most obvious) that I wondered which holidays didn't have their own horror movie. I did some research and found some fascinating titles, not necessarily all good but all fascinating, that spread across the calendar year.

Each of the reviews below was posted in 2017 or 2018 on the holiday on which its film was either entirely or, at least, predominantly set. I look mostly at the film, of course, but also the holiday and see how well the two tie together.

Over the year, the list is rather varied, by era and tone and culture, not all of these being American movies. I've also tried to avoid the most obvious titles, like Halloween and April Fool's Day because you know about those already.

I hope you choose to celebrate 2017 and 2018 with me by enjoying the Horror Movie Calendar.

Thursday, 18 May 2000

Back in 2004 I decided to finally get on with something I've meant to do for many years: to watch and review all of the films listed in the Top 250 at the Internet Movie Database, from The Godfather at the top to Judgment at Nuremberg at the bottom.

After all, I've always thought of myself as a film fan. I've watched films for as long as I can remember, a lot of films and a wide variety of them too. I knew a lot about them and the people who made them. Even as a youth I bought film magazines, albeit generally specialist ones, and scouted for VHS bargains at flea markets and video rental stores; once DVDs came out I started buying them the way some people buy food. I've also been following the invaluable resource that is IMDb ever since I could download the entire thing from a friend's university account onto fourteen floppy disks.

So I'm a film fan. Yet I could never get past the fact that I hadn't seen three out of every five of the movies on the IMDb Top 250 list, a list that contains what are supposed to be the greatest films ever made. How could that be? Well the one and only reason was unavoidable: maybe I wasn't the expert I thought I was. Maybe I merely knew a lot about a little and there was a lot more out there about which I knew nothing at all. That was certainly backed up when I did some analysis. I had huge gaps, glaring gaps that suggested that I was really more of a cinematic novice than an experienced viewer, merely one with a few areas of expertise.

Partly that's because rather than seeing the latest Oscar winner, it's always been far more likely that I'd be watching a cult movie, an obscure movie or a really bad movie. If life was really good, it would satisfy all three of those descriptions at once. I'd delved quite a way into genres with cryptic names like kaiju, giallo or anime. I had something of a background with Hammer horrors, spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong bullet ballets; fifties sci-fi B-movies, seventies exploitation flicks and all the offbeat stuff that Alex Cox chose to air on Moviedrome on BBC2. You could say that I shared a lot of my taste with industry luminaries like Jonathan Ross or Quentin Tarantino. The big difference is that they've seen the famous stuff too.

To the best of my memory, I hadn't seen a single film by Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman, Frank Capra or Preston Sturges, D W Griffith or Sidney Lumet. While I knew who they were by sight, I'd never seen Gable or Garbo in a movie, let alone Garfield or Gilbert, Gardner or Gish. Other recognisable names I'd only seen in a single film, people like Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Jack Lemmon, Bette Davis and Woody Allen. That can't be good. I even remembered back to a trip to Universal Studios in Florida where I thoroughly enjoyed an exhibit dedicated to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, without recognising most of what was on show. When I counted up what I'd seen of his work I could only get to four and one of them was an obscurity.

So in 2004 I began working through the whole IMDb Top 250, watching the films, reading up on them and reviewing them, with vague aims of publishing the results in book form as a travelogue through the history of cinema by someone who thought he was an expert but quickly found that he wasn't. However the list could only ever be a starting point, albeit a solid one, and I had to track sideways to the actors and filmmakers I discovered, learning more about them and about cinema in general through experiencing their work. That decision led to a minor blog on my main website and then to this far more substantial blog and a couple of million words. It also led to a journey I thought might take a couple of years taking no less than seven instead. Here are the results, posted five reviews a week through 2010 and with subsequent followup to address the changes since I began.

I hope your journey is as fascinating, as enjoyable and as eye opening as mine.

Here's the static list I've worked from as I grabbed it in late 2004, with links to my reviews, IMDb pages and ratings from my better half and I. I'll post five more every Wednesday night through the year. I'll follow up in 2011 with films that charted after I grabbed this list.